1/48 Hasegawa Mitsubishi F-2A

by Goran Kovacic

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This is my first Hasegawa kit and it is a very good one. Except for the decals of course, everything else fits nicely without much sanding. This plane looks a lot like the F-16 but it has a 25% larger wing area. It also has a trisectioned "birdstrike" canopy, designed to withstand collisions with flying birds during low altitude operations, and it also holds many other technological innovations like the active phased radar and the LCD flatsrceen in the cockpit which increases pilot visibility.

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My huge mistake in this build is that I experimented with canopy polishing. Unfortunately for me, it didn't work as I expected, as you can see, two sections of the "birdstrike" canopy are blurry and the clear one is the part I didn't polish. Well, better luck next time with the canopy.

I used MM enamels, but couldn't get the two blue colors right from the bottle so I had to mix my own colors. I decided not to weather this aircraft so much since it is a relatively new plane in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force. Although on many pictures you can see some dirt in the panel lines I built a somewhat cleaner aircraft. I armed it with everything you get in the kit plus four more AIM-7F Sparrows ( the kit contains one 300gal droptank, two 600gal droptanks and four AAM-3 Air to Air Missiles). 

Hope you like it,

Goran

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Photos and text © by Goran Kovacic